I don't get it, you get a pop up message and your client glows when you match up for a game do you not? Why can't you just go do whatever like surf the internet until you get a match? It kind of sounds like you want to be able to be a bystander in the queue and gauge whether you can get a game in the next 20 seconds by whether someone around you is searching. However, you can extrapolate that behavior to everyone and now there is a potential player caused lock with no one searching even though there are enough people that want to play a game.
Like regardless of the "gating in" stuff, if you go away from your pc, you aren't going to see it. So I don't really see how it helps anyone here in being able to be "more afk" while the game is getting ready to launch.
This would also require the server to be constantly checking for match quality. As far as I know, it only checks for these things at game initialization.